The present invention relates to a caching method of graphic processing unit (GPU) for improving image processing performance.
The GPU has multiple cores which are arranged in grid structure. The multiple cores parallely process data which results in high performance in image processing. Further, GPU may provide fast processing for ordinary data, and this kind of GPU may be called as a general purpose GPU (GPGPU).
The GPU may process video data by unit of area block. The mask operation is an example in which GPU uses a mask matrix. The mask operation is based on the convolution technique. In the convolution technique, the mask operation, the base unit of area block processing, is applied to the entire image with moving the position.
The GPU may read video data from an internal or external memory, e.g., a global memory, for image processing. The read speed of the global memory is rather slow, which lowers its image processing performance. Moreover, the GPU duplicates read operations of video data out of the global memory, because the multiple cores of the GPU individually access the global memory. This inefficiency in memory access further lowers image processing performance of the GPU.